The New Google Trends Is Kinda Hot

Content creators’ prayers to the god of search has been answered. Today, Google rolled out its biggest update to Google Trends since 2012—and real-time data and a redesigned, intuitive homepage are the biggest blessings for content marketers looking to up their data-driven content game.

To find out what users wanted most, Google collected feedback from hundreds of journalists across the globe. And it looks like these respondents desired three big things: real-time information, a focus on storytelling, and curated data sets. Because that’s exactly what they got.

First, let’s look at the new story-heavy homepage. Visiting Google Trends now presents you with a list of featured stories based on what is gaining traction on Google Search, YouTube, and Google News.

Clicking on a topic will take you to a page with some helpful information, such as the most relevant articles on that topic, interest over time, interest by region, and trending searches. Each featured story also includes specially curated data. For example, the NBA Finals 2015 story hub includes a list of the top trending players on Google during Game 6, as well as a map of the most-searched teams by region—a boon for sports journalists looking for that choice stat to share on Twitter.

Going deeper, all of these insights are provided with Google Trends’ new real-time data reporting capabilities. You can now search each of Google’s 100 billion monthly searches minute by minute to see how topics have gained traction across the web.

Finally, Google’s News Lab team will publish data sets about key trends on their GitHub page. You can download these sets to perform your own analyses on Google’s biggest stories.

With all of these innovations, journalists and content marketers alike should be able to find and use more detailed and informative data than ever before. In sum, you’re about to get even more dependent on our benevolent Internet overlord.